[Quentin had stared down into the fountain's primly cascading waters, the artificiality of which is in the end one and the same with the slow quiet branch of the creek that cuts through his family's property crying into her damp blouse then she was lying on her back looking past me and the glass-bottle colored Charles churning beneath his shadow, all of it trickling from the same spring in his mind. Then as if in answer to some inquiry or plea he does not speak, from the water rose a box that floated toward him with unmistakable intent.
He sits now at the fountain's edge clutching the pocket watch which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his father had given him not that he may remember time but that he might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all his breath trying to conquer it, he said, the watch whose erroneous ticking he could not fix before he left it with Shreve and stepped out into the twilight. He opens it then, taking stock of Lucretia only at the edge of his vision where she is an inscrutable shape first and then a person, a negro woman, when at last he looks proper.]
1.
He sits now at the fountain's edge clutching the pocket watch which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his father had given him not that he may remember time but that he might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all his breath trying to conquer it, he said, the watch whose erroneous ticking he could not fix before he left it with Shreve and stepped out into the twilight. He opens it then, taking stock of Lucretia only at the edge of his vision where she is an inscrutable shape first and then a person, a negro woman, when at last he looks proper.]
Say, do you have the time?